Sometimes it’s useful to disable buffering for printf/fprintf etc. This is especially the case when you’re trying to debug a program and you’re not sure if it’s going to exit prematurely, before the output buffer gets flushed.

It’s a pain to stick fflush() after every fprintf. The proper way to do it is:

I’m sure there are lots of password generators out there, but a quick way of achieving this at the command line is something like

cat /dev/urandom | dd count=1 2> /dev/null | base64

Then copy and paste as much as you need. The result will be fairly unmemorable, but apart from OS login passwords which need to be typed, most logins can be automated, eg by using user:pass@host style URLs.

So the SqlType bit is Firebird-specific, and I don’t think it was very obviously documented anywhere in the Firebird docs. It feels a bit nasty to write code like this because it means I’m locked in to one database backend FOREVER.

For a fun bonus rant, the NHibernate page seems to be down at the moment. You can say what you want about Java, but the open-source tools and community are so much richer for Java than they are for C#. In fact, I’d say that C# is at around the Java 1.2 level on this basis.

Thanks to The Register, whose story linked to an email which details RMS’ rider and requirements for making speeches in tedious detail.

Honestly, this stuff makes “a bowl of blue M&Ms” look trivial. We learn that he doesn’t like dogs, can’t sleep if the temperature is higher than 22°C, and that “I like some wines…but I don’t remember the names of wines I have liked”.

Even if I thought this guy was the messiah of free software (I am an avid emacs user), I don’t think I would want to host such a fussy and childish person.